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This App Is Sexist And It's Not Okay

Meet Donna, a new personal assistant app launched just in time to reaffirm that sexism in tech is alive and well. The service, built by San Francisco’s Incredible Labs, manages your calendar, organizes conference calls, and even lets you order an Uber.

Sounds great, right? Maybe. But Donna’s branding ensures I will never use it, and here’s why.

By calling a personal assistant app a female name, Donna’s makers take us back to a time when a woman’s only role in the workplace was as a secretary. Donna’s Twitter background – a cutesy cartoon typewriter – may evoke nostalgia, but ought to also remind users that “typewriter” once referred to both a female typist and the machine she typed on. In 2013, this app similarly conflates gender and profession problematically in technology.

It seems Donna’s makers may have received some flak for gendering their app in earlier versions. TechCrunch notes:

“Those who are already using the app in beta will probably also notice a big change in appearance in the new app: Gone is the Donna logo, which hinted at a female personal assistant, as well as the handwriting motif throughout. Incredible Labs CEO Kevin Cheng says that the startup received a lot of feedback about the logo and decided to change it.”

Donna's former logo (TechCrunch)

How, exactly, did the old Donna logo hint at a “female personal assistant?” Well, it was purple and swirly, of course.

Regarding the former logo, Kevin Cheng, CEO of Incredible Labs and Donna co-founder, replied over email: “That we changed our logo is not because it implied she was female, but because the logo implied she was somehow subservient which she is not.”

Unfortunately, the app still does more than just imply a female personal assistant. The privacy details of the live version read: “Donna shares only information you allow her to in order to provide her services, or if the law requires her to.”

Donna’s CEO, Kevin Cheng, even refers to the app as a “she,” evidenced in this TechCrunch video. TechCrunch admits the makers’ use of female pronouns is “a bit disarming, but it also speaks to the care they took in building Donna.”

Donna's privacy text

According to TechCrunch, the app is named after West Wing character Donna Moss, “who begins the show as an assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff but eventually rises in the ranks to become the First Lady’s Chief of Staff.” TechCrunch seems to use this television example to suggest the app’s name is not demeaning, but rather refers to a powerful woman who “proves herself invaluable by taking care of things and cleaning up messes before they happen.” Unfortunately for the Donna app, it’s unlikely “she’ll” ever become more than a “servile note-taking and schedule-managing app,” as Gawker dubbed “her.”

If the app makers wanted to evoke a character who takes care of business, why not just call it “Don,” like an organized crime boss or Oxford professor? Better still, why not pick a gender-neutral title?

Cheng explained in an email:

“Regarding the naming of Donna, we’ve definitely thought deeply about the issue and were very sensitive to the risks of what that may portray. We wanted to create a character—a persona—that people could refer to directly. Thus, a gender-neutral name wouldn’t work because it was important that you could actually refer to the person as “he” or “she”. We considered male names as well, such as “Radar” (named after Radar O’Reilly) or “Alfred” but nothing we attempted quite fit (and that’s before considering domain naming availability). We considered allowing people to choose their own name, but that didn’t fit either because this character supposed to be -one- character that can handle everything.”

While the business benefits of building a personable and memorable service are obvious, I can’t help but be irked by Donna’s branding. In calling a personal assistant app a female name, its makers are reinforcing gender stereotypes that are horrifyingly outdated.

For their part, Incredible Labs say: “Donna is more Chief-of-Staff than assistant, she’s the supercomputer that is able to keep track of everyone’s comings and goings and get everyone places on time, with all the information they need. In our minds, we (the team at Incredible Labs) are barely keeping up with Donna.”

I don’t think Incredible Labs intended to offend with their app, nor do I doubt that their service has merit, but it’s this sort of quiet sexism that reinforces archaic views and lays the groundwork for outspoken sexism. Not all personal assistants need be female, and I won’t have any app tell me otherwise.

This article was updated on 7/5/13 at 4.40pm EST to include a response from Kevin Cheng, CEO of Incredible Labs.

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“By calling a personal assistant app a female name, Donna’s makers take us back to a time when a woman’s” I won’t read anymore of this article. If the app had a male name, would it still be sexist? Seriously, you’re being stupid.

I can’t believe someone at Forbes actually approved putting this article on your website. And this author is probably one of those angry feminists who wonders why the rest of society likes to poke fun at them.

Virtually every personal assistant I have ever met is female. Knowing the vast majority of personal assistants out there are female, and knowing they wanted to give the app a human name to personalize it some, giving it a female name is simply common sense. (something this author seems to lack).

You don’t know much. All you have is an erroneous obsolete ideology. You use the threat of governmental power to intimidate people.

Feminism is variant of Socialism. It developed when it became apparent in the 1950s that socialism (and communism) had failed. Feminism hasn’t failed yet, but it will because it is anti-human.

It refuses to believe that women may have values different from the feminists. That they may want to specialize in providing homes and rearing children. And that the commercial life extolled by Feminists is death to their souls. This is not about what men want, but what women do. But, you have no interest in determining that because these women are traitors to their gender, just like working people who wanted their own businesses were traitors to their class.

You feminists have been focused on industry, but industry is dying. The next few decades will be trying. Highly bureaucratic businesses, where you now preside, are not flexible enough to weather the problems ahead.

Small business people are not going to care what your sex is. All they want to know is whether you can make them money. No ideologue will be able to compete with someone focused on success. Your prickly sensitivities are a job killer. How does your feminism place food on your employer’s table? If it does not, why should he or she employ you?

It just occurred to me that you think it sexist to call a machine by a feminine name. What happens when the man or woman owning such a machine gets wealthy enough to afford a human assistant? Is it sexist to think of employing a woman for that position? Or is it sexist to only think of hiring a man? No, you can’t think of hiring the most qualified person, either, because this is a political decision, not a business one. That is because the person doing the hiring as no rights.

Natalie, thanks for challenging the branding of this startup – a 50′s motif and a gendered personal assistant clearly smack of sexism, harken back to a time characterized by white-supremacist patriarchal terrible dominant culture. The TV show Mad Men shows a bad time for women, people, a time when they had to struggle to move the world from where it was then to where it is now. Imagine if TaskRabbit was instead named some stereotypical African American name from the 1800′s and was branded in a Southern Plantation motif. Shameful that the commenters here come out like so many trolls to attack you for gently making such an important critique.

Ridiculous! We are suppose to learn about sexist exploitation from Forbes (scribe to the Hearst family wealthy from exploiting racist displacement of Native Americans) and a brat from the UAE where labor rights for domestic servants dont exist much less human rights.

Googling for a second, I’m willing to bet that the company producing the Donna app exhibits more workplace diversity than Forbes will ever have.

Maybe if Forbes hired more editors who were sons and daughters of women subjugated into personal assistants because their land was mined by people like the Hearsts, they would be able produce a readable article on this topic. Until then I’m boycotting Forbes.

P.S.

Racism equivalent to sexism?? Last time I checked Donna wasnt a derogatory name. I guess all perfectly qualified manual laborers who are African American should leave their jobs. Same for all perfectly qualified female personal assistants. Dont worry the government will give you all servants like in the UAE.

Finally one thing that was good about the 50s is that journalists didnt rely on their readers to complete their thoughts. Two steps backwards one step forward.